How Were States, Towns and Places Named?
Farmer's Almanac
More than two hundred years ago, in March 1784, Thomas Jefferson proposed a number of names for new states to be formed out of the vast territory west of the Appalachian Mountains. Had his suggestions been followed, today's roll call of the states might include Chersonesus, Polypotamia, Assenisipia, and Pelisipia.
Instead the English custom of naming places according to local traditions held sway. That is why Indian names, though often misspelled and misinterpreted, dominate the more than two million place names recording by the U.S. Geological Survey's Board of Geographic Names.
For example, Wisconsin comes from Quisconsing, which was how the French explorers Marquette and Joliet spelled the Indian word Mesconsing. But a careless French mapmaker in 1715 spelled it Ouariconsint, which some geographers think may have led to the naming of Oregon.
The American Revolution caused more than a few towns and places to be renamed and supplied many new heroes to memorialize. The greatest of these, of course, was George Washington, who still holds the record for the most place names in this or any other country -- 1 state; 33 counties; 121 cities, towns and villages; 257 townships; 10 lakes; 8 streams; 7 mountains; and thousands of streets and other manmade features. Strangely, the state of Washington was not named until 1853, although both Mississippi in 1817 and Minnesota in 1847 were almost named for him.
When Washington finally entered the roll call of the states, it was an eleventh-hour substitution. The settlers in that state had asked Congress to accept the name Columbia, after Christopher Columbus and the great river than runs through the Northwest. Oddly enough, Congress decided on Washington instead -- responding to one legislator's claim that otherwise the new state would be endlessly confused with the District of Columbia!
Such confused thinking also attended the christening of other western states. Residents of the Pike's Peak region petitioned Congress in 1861 to name their new state Idaho. Congress instead named it Colorado, on the ground that is was the source of the great Colorado River, which it was not (to rectify this, the state of Colorado later renamed the Grand River, a tributary of the Colorado that does rise in that state, the Colorado River). This act annoyed representatives of the Territory of Arizona (through which the Colorado does flow), who wished to name their state after the river.
Supporters of the name Idaho, which was thought to be an Indian word meaning Gem of the Mountains (it was not), got a second chance in 1863 when another territory was named. This time Idaho got the better of Montana (Latin for "mountainous"), which had to wait until the next year, when it was hung on the eastern section of the Idaho territory (which is mostly flat plains). The neighboring territory of Wyoming, which includes two formidable mountain ranges, was named for a valley in Pennsylvania; the term comes form an Eastern Indian name meaning "large plains". The tradition of geographical error continued with the name of sun-parched Nevada, which means "snowed upon".
By 1890 the frontier had officially been declared closed. There were no unnamed sates or territories, and the federal government decided it was time to establish an official arbiter of place names. The Board of Geographic Names was founded to straighten out disputes over names and to approved new names where necessary. The board still exists, deliberating over more than one hundred proposed name changes or new names every month. It continues to generate controversy, such as when it changed the name of Cape Canaveral (which dates back to Ponce de Leon and is thus one of the oldest names in America) to Cape Kennedy in 1963 (Canaveral was restored in 1973).
If such controversies seem like making a mountain out of a molehill, rest assured there is a precedent for that. Acceding to the request of a West Virginia town's residents, the board not long ago changed the town's name from Mole Hill to Mountain.